I stepped off the dirty chrome Greyhound bus in Livingstone, Montana, several thousand metres above sea level, and wondered why the rain was so warm. Looking up, I saw a bone-dry, guano-caked bus shelter. Looking down, I saw that the change of altitude had made my body depressurise with an explosive nosebleed. A lurid delta flowed across the front of my one tolerably clean t-shirt. This being a frontier town, my grisly apparition attracted barely a glance. Perhaps they thought I’d just looked at someone’s new pick-up truck the wrong way. I did however get a sympathetic discount and a free roll of toilet paper when I bought another t-shirt at a nearby drug store.

I’d decided to spend my long summer break from university working abroad with the help of the BUNAC ‘Work America’ programme. The previous summer had seen me filing Social Security claims in Manchester. Oddly, this convinced me I was at heart a wilderness man. So it was that I found a job in Yellowstone National Park, that tangled knot of wild nature, ferocious geology and rapacious tourism high in the Rocky Mountains.

Two more slow bus-rides later, I arrived at my destination, groggy and with a familiar tang of copper in my nostrils. What I initially took for heat haze was in fact an endless, teeming cloud of mosquitoes. In the months to follow, revulsion for these whining fiends faded to irritation, occasionally relieved by maniacal laughter when one of the blighters found a vein, causing it to flood its own body and explode with a bubble-wrap pop.

At home, I’d wanted to tell anyone who’d listen that I’d be grappling with bears, moose, landslides, firestorms and the kind of danger you’d be pushed to find in the S to Z section of Social Fund claims to year ending 1990. The few who listened treated me to ‘Yogi Bear’ impressions and, with an eye to my undergraduate beer belly, urged me to keep off the ‘pickernick baskets’.

‘Ranger Smith’ I wasn’t. My job would involve cleaning cabins, mopping floors and counting the takings at the resort of Roosevelt Lodge for the then minimum wage of $4 per hour. The resort lay in a spectacular river valley in the north of the park. It was once used by President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt for hunting grizzlies, hence the nickname for the stuffed variety of bear. Dispersed through the surrounding forest, with its 100-foot lodgepole pines, hunkered log cabins of varying quality, the best for the luxury travellers, the worst for the staff to share.

My first cabin was a crash-course in trailer-park life. I entered the cabin having ignored the strange knocking sounds coming from the inside of the door. I narrowly missed losing my heritage to a razor-edged throwing star being used for target practice by Pat. He’d just returned from a ‘Hell’s Angels’ bonanza in Texas where he’d acquired new and exciting edged weapons with which to while away the long evenings.

Pat wore a confederate headscarf, had gaps in his teeth and chewed matchsticks. They might have enrolled him in the Nazi Party, but he’d have had to tone down his views. He shared a bunk with Billy from Arkansas, a believer in the Old Testament, guns and his sweetheart, Peggy-Lou. My bunk groaned beneath Tom, a 20 stone aficionado of doughnuts, pornography and wrestle-mania. It took me a few days to believe that David Lynch hadn’t created a parade of poor white stereotypes just for my edification. But they were real enough and I got on with them surprisingly well when they weren’t complaining about how difficult my ‘English’ English was to understand. I could have made a living just repeating ‘Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’ for their amusement.

But I didn’t spend the whole summer with them. Everywhere I looked, there was wilderness aching to be explored, and little else by way of entertainment. Like any American school, the resort was very tribal. I never found much in common with the ‘jocks’, much less the genuine wranglers who staffed the resort’s corral. They were troubled by any music not featuring steel guitar and lavished their time on their horses, their trucks and their women, in that order. While the ‘rednecks’ were intriguing, I turned to the ‘stoners’ and the ‘geeks’ as trekking companions. They had a less insular line in conversation and shared my desire to plunge into the great outdoors with only a hazy regard for safety.

Jeff and Curtis, two textbook stoners from Sacramento, narrowly escaped oblivion when driving through a landslide area with the ‘Grateful Dead’ playing at dynamite-volume on the car stereo. The late Mr. Garcia dislodged enough rock to half crush their car. They both walked away, grateful and alive.

We launched an expedition into bear country every weekend. Typically, bears are shy of humans but can be lethally bad-tempered if surprised. It was therefore wise to move through the backcountry as noisily as possible. As for camping, ‘Arkansas Billy’ was indispensable for his ability to shimmy up sheer pines in order to store food out of reach of scavenging bears. Not only are they attracted to cooking smells, they are also drawn to strong human scent. ‘Trail sex’ might therefore develop into an ugly ménage-a-trois.

I was blessed with many jaw-dropping experiences. I crawled to the peak of an almost sheer mountain, its sides bristling with 65 million year old fossil trees, looked out over the vastness of the continent and, to mangle Walt Whitman, sounded “my barbaric yawp” across the rooftops of the world. I spent most of a day crossing a few miles of broken rock where a mountain had fallen on its side and shattered like china. I tiptoed around flat pools and upright cathedrals of boiling mud where the earth’s crust had split to afford a glimpse of primeval forces beneath. I saw hundreds of buffalo cross a road in front of me and swim a lake to find better grazing. I slept in a meadow to be awoken by the banshee wail of coyotes all around.

I saw bears too many times and too near for comfort. Most memorably, I found myself being stared down by a black bear with a cub from about 50 yards away. Mothers with young are about as aggressive as bears get but she placidly decided I was no threat at all and moved on. Perhaps the fact that I was wearing Marigolds swung it.

The daily work was ditchwater dull but a good means to an end. I changed linen, I restocked firewood and I mopped up vomit from overfed children. I baked by day, froze by night and was eaten alive by mosquitoes. I would wake in the small hours as mice and chipmunks ran over my face and hands. We took to leaving kitchen scraps on the floor so they’d leave our bunks alone. This was a gap-year gulag.

One of the delights of communal living was writing postcards in a bottom bunk by torchlight while a couple enjoyed frantic, bed-jolting congress above. I suppose the mosquitoes would have made things a bit bothersome outdoors. Drink and drugs were the alternative to sex. By season’s end, my cabin had something in the region of 400 beer cans to dispose of and a Union Jack bandana to stake my claim to that metal mountain.

The summer season closed and the snows appeared in September. Within a few weeks, most of the resorts would become inaccessible to all but snowmobiles and cross-country skiers. When the last guests left, the janitor covered the furniture, disconnected the mains and boarded up the windows. Once sealed, the resort was reminiscent of ‘The Shining’.

The evening of the inevitable farewell party was warm enough but the stars were pellucid and I could taste winter in the thin air. The wranglers found cause to have a good, old-fashioned fistfight, perhaps because one of them had been driving his new pick-up down a mountain pass when his passenger reached over and turned off the ignition as a joke. The steering lock had come on and the truck had slithered off the road and down a ravine. They’d lived to be stupid another day. Yet whenever I hear the country dirge, ‘Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?’, I imagine an overturned pick-up at the bottom of a ravine, reeking of gasoline, beer and horse-sweat.

Never happy to be a bystander, I scaled the roof, struck the Stars and Stripes from the flagpole and hoisted my Union Jack bandana in its place. The normally reserved and by now inebriated resort manager decided he was Paul Revere and spent the rest of the evening hunting me with a revolutionary glint in his eye. I hid on the roof with my equally sozzled date and watched the stars and satellites scudding through the fine, clean night.

The next summer, I worked in a bank, filing loan applications.